1. Technical Field
Embodiments discussed herein relate generally to interconnect technologies.
2. Background Art
To provide communication between different devices within a system, some type of interconnect mechanism is used. A wide variety of such interconnects are possible depending on a system implementation. Oftentimes to enable two devices to communicate with each other, they share a common communication protocol.
One typical communication protocol for communications between devices in a computer system is a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express™ (PCIe™)) communication protocol in accordance with links based on the PCI Express™ Specification Base Specification version 3.0 (published Nov. 18, 2010) (hereafter the PCIe™ Specification). This communication protocol is one example of a load/store input/output (IO) interconnect system. The communication between the devices is typically performed serially according to this protocol at very high speeds. Various parameters regarding this protocol were developed with the intent to achieve maximum performance without regard to power efficiency, as the PCIe™ communication protocol was developed in the context of desktop computers. As a result, many of its features do not scale down to lower power solutions that could be incorporated into mobile systems.
Various other communication protocols are designed for devices to exchange information using lower power levels than those required for communications according to PCIe. As successive generations of computing and networking technologies become increasingly sensitive to incremental improvements in power efficiency, there is an increasing demand to integrate low-power solutions for communication within and/or between devices.